Weird Foods That Worked Anyway

11 Thursday Jun 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 3 Comments

No pictures, but this is another food post, so skip it if you don’t care about recipes. Yes, maintaining four blogs badly started to feel like more effort than using one blog for everything, so I’m posting about cooking and writing here now. Eventually, I’m going to finish working on the Rozelle Press site and then I’ll make it my official author-y news site and let this just be my personal site, but that hasn’t happened yet. So for the moment, everything gets posted here, and today that means food.

Weird food.

Really weird food.

Last night, I had ground beef that needed to be used, and a plan I didn’t have enough energy to pull off (AIP-friendly meatloaf with mashed cauliflower, not going to happen), and a level of tired that meant all I wanted was to efficiently get my protein and vegetables down my throat so I could go to bed and not sleep some more.

I started out thinking I’d just throw what I had in a frying pan and hope for the best, but once I had a couple carrots and a parsnip chopped up and sauteing in some olive oil, I realized I’d be better off cooking the meat separately. So I started a new pan, with onions, garlic, and ground beef. In the ideal world, I would have thrown some sriracha in, but instead I sprinkled in ground cloves — maybe 1/4 tsp, not much, plus 1 tsp or so of cinnamon and 1 tsp or so of turmeric, and mixed thoroughly.

Yes, this was quite random. I just thought those three spices would probably taste good with parsnips and carrots and meat. I let everything cook slowly for a while–fifteen minutes or so?–with the vegetables covered and the meat not covered, because parsnips and carrots take a long time to get soft on the stove. I poured off some of the oil from the ground beef eventually, then added salt, the vegetables, and about half a bag of spinach. I covered it and let the spinach cook down for another couple of minutes, and then added a handful of chopped up cilantro. Mix thoroughly one last time, give the cilantro a minute to warm up but not lose its flavor. Oh, and I had started roasting the cauliflower before I decided I was too exhausted to make meatloaf, so I also added roast cauliflower before serving.

It was surprisingly delicious. The strongest flavor was the cilantro, but the hints of the other spices gave it a warm, autumn-ish flavor. R agreed, really good, but he ate later than me so I don’t know whether he might have jazzed it up with hot sauce. But honestly, for a fairly high-speed, inexpensive, protein plus vegetable meal, it was entirely acceptable. And I’m writing it down, because if I ever have the same lazy impulse, I know I’ll wonder what I included — the parsnips and the cinnamon were, IMO, the key.

Second weird food, this morning’s chicken soup. Classic leftover soup. To my homemade broth, which was perhaps a little heavy on rosemary when I made it, I added leftover chicken & broccoli slaw stir-fry, roast cauliflower, spinach, & cilantro. And salt. It was delicious. And this one I’m writing down as a reminder to myself that everything works with good chicken broth.

House Satisfaction

09 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in House, Personal, Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

painting the house

Being a homeowner feels sort of overwhelming most of the time. There is always, always, always another thing. If the whole house is vacuumed and dusted, with clean bathrooms and clean sheets and a clean kitchen, then the insurmountable mess of the garage is always there to make me feel guilty. If the back porch is neatly swept and organized, everything in its proper place, plants trimmed back, then there’s weeding to be done and trees that need work and plants that should be treated for bugs or infection. Even when everything’s working, there’s always an appliance making me nervous — the dishwasher not draining, the dryer not drying, the air-conditioner making a funny noise.

And all of that doesn’t even touch the big stuff, like the fact that the paint is (was!) peeling away on the garage and fading so strongly on the sunny side that it looked patchwork. Or the spot on the front where one of the boards is rotting away.

For months, I’ve been wrestling with indecision. Sell the house or get a job that lets me take better care of the house? Those felt like the only two options. Somehow a couple of months ago, I decided to try a third option — at least for the moment — and deal with the big stuff as best I could. So this past week was the week of painting the house. I started working on it a week ago — scraping paint, pressure-washing, priming, and doing my best to patch the area of wood rot. On Saturday, my family and some friends came and helped me paint. We were done with three sides of the house by noon, at which time we had a barbecue — burgers, hot dogs, fruit salad, potato chips, tortilla chips, and three kinds of dip. And then the kids went swimming.

I’m still tired, with sore muscles that twinge every time I raise my arms, but oh, so satisfied. And yes, that picture is me, sitting on my roof (and making my father very nervous — it’s his hand on the ladder, and I can almost promise that there were worried words coming out of his mouth.) But every time I look up at that wall now — nicely blue, trim bright and white — I get to think, I did that. I took care of that.

It’s a good feeling.

My dog might not be dumb

02 Tuesday Jun 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 4 Comments

I think my dog has been deceiving me.

When a dog grows up with you, from puppy to adult, almost every day of her life spent in your company, you get to know her pretty well. When she’s your first dog, she shapes your ideas about what dogs are like. Then dog number two comes along and of course, he’s different. In Bartleby’s case, the open question has been, “Is he really dumb? Or is Zelda just really smart?” Because clearly one of those two things is true. Maybe both of them are true.

Training Zelda is pretty much a matter of figuring out how to explain to her what you want. Once she understands you, she’ll give it to you. She’s actually a lot better at training me than I am at training her. When she discovered that Bartleby’s glucosamine treats for joint pain were delicious, it took her about two days of sitting and staring at the treat box for ten minutes at a time before I started giving her one, too. Now, every morning, after breakfast, if I forget, she will get my attention and then go stare at the treat box until she gets her glucosamine. She’s ten years old and she’s learned this within the past six months. There’s some innate behaviors that I don’t think can be trained out of her, like her desperate need to chase any squirrels out of the backyard, and some behavioral stuff that I probably went wrong on too early, like her conviction that the right spot to be in a thunderstorm is on top of me, but otherwise, she’s so responsive. She tries really hard to understand me and do what I want her to do and she does really well at it. C votes for Zelda being a genius, so maybe she is.

In comparison… well, honestly, I’ve thought that possibly Bartleby’s head just isn’t big enough to have much working brain inside of it. (Ignoring the fact that he’s not that much smaller than Zelda.) Two years of putting his food in the exact same spot every single morning and evening and he still can’t bring himself to sit in the right place to wait for it. Trying to teach him to lie down seems impossible. He just gives me this blank stare out of his dark eyes and waits for me to give up. Sometimes I’m not even sure whether he knows his name. If he does, he practices very selective hearing.

But I could be wrong.

All last summer, I would bring him into the pool for a couple minutes at a time, just to get him used to the water. If he ever fell in accidentally, which happened a couple times, I wanted him to be comfortable enough not to panic. He never seemed to like it much, but he tolerated it. This summer, he’s started carefully jumping in. I’ll be in the pool, standing at the edge, when he comes up to me. Once I put my hands on either side of his body, he takes a little jump onto my shoulder. He’ll sit on me for a while, seeming to enjoy the water, and then start paddling. I let him go, he paddles to the steps, and hops out.

All that was fine, until he discovered the delights of rolling in dirt to dry off. Argh. He turns into a little mud dog. He’s got long, lovely, silky fur that becomes a matted, disgusting, tangle-y mess when covered in dirt. Not fun. Trying to convince him to stop was pointless. I’d say, “No!” and he’d give me that blank look, like, “Are you talking to me? Noise comes out of your mouth, but it means nothing,” and dash for the dirt.

So, in another instance of my dogs training me, I started promptly following him out of the pool to towel him off before he could reach the dirt. Fortunately, he loves being toweled dry. He especially loves it when I leave a towel spread on the chaise lounge so that it gets nice and warm from the sun.

But here’s the thing — it took him three days, three days, to understand that when I say, “towel” and point to the chaise, he should run there, jump up, and wait for me. Two years and he barely recognizes his name. Three days and he’s figured out how to get a warm, cozy towel wrapped around him for a full-body massage.

I think Bartleby has just been pretending to be dumb.

Guest posting

01 Monday Jun 2015

Posted by in Randomness

≈ 2 Comments

One of the interesting (and fun) aspects of participating in an anthology is working on marketing efforts with my fellow authors. I’m very much a skeptic about most marketing endeavors but for this project, I decided to adopt the “give it your all” attitude and go along with every idea suggested. And there have been lots of ideas!

One of them, though, was that we all try to guest post at three different blogs. Eep. I cannot (really, truly, absolutely cannot) invite myself to write at someone else’s blog. As I said in a comment on my last post, I don’t know how to invite myself to other people’s blogs, anymore than I could invite myself to someone’s house for the weekend. I’m just not sociable that way. Happy to write, yes, but asking to show up on someone’s blog feels like asking to add lines to their poem or something.

That said, if you are reading and you have a blog and you like it when people add lines to your poem — metaphorically, obviously, I’m not really a poet — well, yeah… I’m inviting invitations and would love to come chat with you/to your readers. 🙂

Mad Max: Fury Road review

25 Monday May 2015

Posted by in Movies, Reviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

So Mad Max is not my kind of movie in ever so many ways. Let me count them, in fact.

First, it’s dystopic, which I don’t enjoy seeing. I didn’t even make it through the Hunger Games or any of its sequels and I loved those books.

Second, it’s violent, which is not my thing. I’m — well, if I’m being kind to myself, I’ll pick the words “highly sensitive.” I’ve watched movies that have given me nightmares for months afterwards, so I avoid watching violent stuff. I used to joke that I’d decided to be the last easily shocked person in America, but seriously, there are some television shows that I can’t handle. Movie theater violence is way beyond my ability to tolerate.

Third, it’s filled with car chases and explosions, which I find mostly boring. Long action sequences generally leave me working on my to-do list in my head. Maybe that’s because I’m easily overstimulated, so I start to lose track of what’s going on? I don’t know but I do know that the description of Max Max as “one long extended car chase” is a two thumbs down description for me.

Fourth, I don’t care about the original movies, so there’s no nostalgia factor for me. Fifth, none of the actors mean anything to me. Sixth…maybe that’s enough. Clearly no power on earth is getting me to Max Max: Fury Road.

And then the men’s right activists declared that men should boycott the movie because it’s “feminist” and I got interested. I read a review or two. They raved about the acting, about the depth, about the beauty of the action sequences. I thought well, maybe, but… probably not. Really, it’s just not the kind of thing my psyche can handle. I’m a wimp. (<–That's me not being so kind to myself.)

But when R expressed interest, with the caveat that he was "not sure it's mom appropriate," I said "let's do it." Mostly because going to the movies together was a nice way to celebrate him being home. I figured it if it was too much for me, I'd avert my eyes and stare at the floor.

OMG, what an amazing movie. It was incredible. It was dazzling and beautiful and intense and powerful and the ending… I so want to talk about the ending, which I am not going to do because I can talk to myself without typing and I don't want to spoil it for anyone else. But there's a moment in the movie that was the most powerful statement of respect that I've ever seen a man give to a woman. Seriously, it was shocking. Shocking. And alone, worth the price of admission.

The men’s rights activists are sort of right — Mad Max is the most profoundly feminist movie I’ve ever seen. But it’s almost sad that our language thinks equality and respect are feminist issues, and not simply people issues. Because Mad Max is not just feminist. It triumphantly espouses the idea that everyone can make a difference — women, yes, but also the disabled, the weak, the old, the sick. It was beautiful. And so worth watching.

In the grocery store afterwards, I wanted to poke every stranger I passed and say, “Have you seen Mad Max yet? You should.”

So have you seen Mad Max yet? You should.

Grace Agonizing

13 Wednesday May 2015

Posted by in Grace, Randomness, Writing

≈ 5 Comments

Much writing agony lately. I had the file for A Gift of Grace open all day yesterday. I’d tweak a word or two, write a sentence, and then wander off to do something else. I’d force myself to come back to it — I had a whole day with nothing I needed to do but write, so I was serious about trying to use my time wisely — but I’d last five minutes and then drift off again.

A couple of times, the drifting off was literal. I wasn’t tired, I didn’t think, but somehow I wound up napping in the morning and then falling asleep maybe before 9. I say maybe, because I’m not really sure. I was awake and then… not. Anyway, I’m trying to tell myself that my subconscious needs to work on the story. Maybe that’s even true.

For once, my problem doesn’t seem to be entirely me being self-critical. I seem to have a ton of pieces, but it’s like they’re for a jigsaw puzzle that doesn’t quite fit together. Maybe it’s too many pieces, too much story? Maybe it’s a collection of scenes, minus a plot? I know how to get the answers to these questions — start writing and find out what I’ve got when I get there — but it’s tough for me to write when I don’t know what direction I’m headed in.

The nice thing is that this is resulting in being well-fed in a clean house with well-exercised dogs. Yesterday I did a load of laundry because I decided I had too many damp towels. I even folded it and put it all away, a job which really is a lot easier when you don’t start with huge piles.

This morning, I had no easy protein ready for breakfast. I could have made chicken soup — I made broth yesterday and have leftover roast chicken from Monday — but that felt like too much work. So I made some baked chicken thighs with artichokes, olives and lemon. It took about ten minutes to put together, but when I put it in the oven I realized I was going to have to wait an hour to eat. To kill some time, I made a garlic-lemon-rosemary-salt rub and prepped some pork chops for grilling later. Forty-five minutes to go on my chicken and I decided I was too hungry to wait, so I pulled out some cabbage slaw, red onion, cilantro & avocado, and topped it with some shrimp sauteed with garlic, lemon, and more cilantro. Yep, it’s not quite 9AM and I’ve cooked (mostly) three meals, adding up to probably eight meals total for me, because the chicken and pork chops will be multiple meals. So what I am going to do with the rest of my day?

Answer: write, drat it. Maybe I should write some random, out-of-order scenes and see what Grace and Noah have to tell me. It’s frustrating, though, to look at my word count and see that I really ought to have a solid third of a book by now, if only so much of it wasn’t destined to be scraped away into the garbage disposal. Someday I will be able to stop writing half a book in order to find out where the beginning is. Apparently it won’t be with this book, though.

Two weeks and R will be home for the summer. I am hoping that he and I can do some good summer projects (aka much needed painting jobs) while he’s home as well as have a fun little vacation, so I’m guessing that June is not going to be my most productive month ever. All the more reason to get a lot done now. I hope my subconscious got some thinking done while I was sleeping!

Mother’s Day

09 Saturday May 2015

Posted by in Mom, Personal

≈ 1 Comment

I intend to have an absolutely lovely Mother’s Day tomorrow. I’ll be driving to Sarasota, where I will pick up R, and we will go out to some nice AIP-friendly lunch (which means it will probably be a lot more generic than our usual taste, but that’s okay for now) and then to the Avengers movie. If we have time, I’m hoping I can convince him to take a walk on the beach afterwards, but the time limit is the dogs, who will be wanting food at home. On my way home, I plan to stop at Trader Joe’s, where I will buy myself some gluten-free dark chocolate caramels, which are… oh, crack. They are the crack of chocolate. At least for me.

It’s going to be a really nice day.

Today, though, I’m thinking about my mom. About how much I miss her. About what a good mom she was and whether she ever knew that. About how my default position with good news is still that I want to tell her, first and always. When I realized how many copies of Ghosts had been downloaded, she was the only person I wanted to call. I worked my way around to realizing that there were other people who would be proud of me, celebrate with me, but it took a while. The only person I wanted was her. And I realized this week, for really the first time, that one of the very saddest things about losing her so soon, so much too soon, is that she never gets to know the person I turn out to be.

Because I’m not stagnant. I’m growing and changing still. The cook I am today is light years away from the cook I was five years ago. And my mom never gets to know the cook for whom Thanksgiving dinner is playful and daily dinner is absurd. Hell, dinner? My *breakfasts* are more gourmet than the fanciest meal I ever made while she was alive.

She never read anything I’ve written. At the time, it didn’t matter. I didn’t care. I told her when she asked that I knew she would tell me it was wonderful, so I didn’t need her to say the words. But now… well, she might actually think it was wonderful. And I will never get to hear her say those words.

She didn’t know the person who dropped out of graduate school. She doesn’t know the me who is gluten-free and prioritizes yoga above work. She never met Bartleby. And the part of me that is spiritual says that’s okay, she knows. But the part of me that is practical and lives in the material world is so, so, so sad. I miss her so much. I want her to be here. And there aren’t any words, any comforting sayings, that make up for the fact that I can’t pick up the phone and call her and tell her that I am sad.

I am out of tissues.

A Shy Brag

05 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Randomness, Self-publishing

≈ 4 Comments

I told my friend Tim that I spent my afternoon engaged in a task that should best be described as vainglorious. That made me realize that I maybe wasn’t 100% sure of the definition of vainglorious, so I looked it up, and yep, I was using it right.

I realized this morning — I don’t know why — that Ghosts might have been downloaded over 100,000 times. I don’t keep good track of the numbers. I make sure to pay my taxes, but apart from that, I try not to watch. But it’s free and it’s stayed pretty close to the top of the metaphysical bestseller list on Amazon for a good long time now and… well, yeah. I thought it was possible. And honestly, pretty cool if it had been. Sort of terrifying, too, of course, given my initial expectations & goals (I think I wanted to sell an ambitious hundred copies), but nonetheless, cool.

So, this afternoon, I was in a mood–a bad one–and I decided to add up the numbers. What a pain. I had to open spreadsheets that I’d never looked at, download some that I’d never downloaded, organize numbers, remember how to use Excel, but once I’d started, I persisted. And, um, yeah, as of April 29th, A Gift of Ghosts had been downloaded over 150,000 times on Amazon and the international Amazons. Add some rough numbers from Smashwords (that might include A Gift of Thought), plus Draft2Digital, and Kobo, and the total is over 200,000.

Tomorrow, not today, I’m going to add up the totals for the other books. They’re much lower, of course — free is an awfully effective price. But I bet sometime this year, maybe over a quarter million of my titles will be downloaded and that… well, makes me blush. Quite literally — and not the literally that means figuratively, I mean that my cheeks are hot and pink as I write. But I’m pretty sure I’m blushing with delight.

Adjectives, adverbs, and imagination

05 Tuesday May 2015

Posted by in Writing

≈ Comments Off on Adjectives, adverbs, and imagination

I am, technically, about three years into my “taking writing seriously” journey. It was just about this time in 2012 when I decided I needed to drop out of my master’s program. Writing was the somewhat decrepit life raft, leaky and not very sturdy, upon which I landed. Frankly, it sort of amazes me that three years have passed, although that first year was pretty much lost in a blur of tears and depression. But still, I have learned a lot. I may not be the writer I want to be (yet), but in bits and pieces, occasional lines, steps forward and then back, I think I’m getting there.

One of the areas I feel like I finally understand in a more developed way is the oft-repeated, oftener-ignored advice to avoid adverbs. There are basically two conflicting “rules” about this that you’ll hear in critique groups. One is to use stronger verbs instead, i.e. instead of “walk slowly,” “trudged.” Of course, if you replace “said angrily” with “raged,” you’ll hear that you should avoid using dialog tags except “said” and if you see how those two rules work together, congratulations, you’re smarter than me. I think Stephen King basically decreed these rules in On Writing and to the best of my recollection, he claims that writers use adverbs out of fear and timidity.

Maybe.

But I think writers use them — or at least I used them — in an attempt to make my story as clear, as precise, as accurate a depiction of my image of the story as I could. And I’ve come to realize that I don’t need to do that. More than that, the story is better when I don’t. It’s better because it leaves the reader more room to bring her imagination to the game.

Here’s an example from the first draft of the book I ought to be working on right now:

“They are evil spirits,” she said. “And your Noah is clearly possessed by a djinn. He creates ifrits wherever he goes.”
“He doesn’t create them,” Joe protested. “You know that.”
“We have had this argument before. A thousand times before. I know an ifrit when I see one.”
“Are you saying you and Misam are evil spirits? If you’re not, why are the rest of us?” Joe said, with strained patience.

I’ve used “protested” and “strained patience”. But what would happen if I didn’t? In those words, I’m revealing information about Joe, and his relationship with Nadira — that it’s ongoing, argumentative, and strained. The reader might decide from this that Joe is kind of a jerk. Or that Nadira is, depending on your perspective. If she or he is left with just the dialog, though — without *my* interpretation of it — they get to decide what it means, how it sounds. And what they’ll bring to that decision will come from their imagination, not mine, which means it will be stronger and more meaningful to them.

When we use adjectives and adverbs, we narrow the possible scope of the story. We lose the opportunity to let it resonate in a different way for the reader. Sometimes that’s okay. Sometimes it’s essential. If I need the reader to see a magical fairyland, I’m not going to depend exclusively on nouns and verbs. But sometimes — and more often than I’ve ever realized in anything I’ve written — we can rely on the reader to fill in the story, in the way that will work best for him or her.

Take a line like this one: “I didn’t understand what you meant,” she said.

If the reader would be angry in this situation, maybe she hears that line in her head in an angry voice. If the reader is a gentler type, maybe she hears it in a more placating voice. Either way, she’s going to identify more with the character because the character is more like her. That’s because she’s bringing her ideas, her imagination, to the creation of the character.

Actors understand this. The same role gets different interpretations, has different meanings. Is Hamlet an idealistic activist or an incestuously-conflicted son? Shakespeare didn’t dictate the answers, which probably has a lot to do with why the play is still performed hundreds of years after it was written. On the other hand, the simplest possible way to for me to establish the distinction between those two approaches was with two adjectives and an adverb. It’s not wrong to use them, but I finally understand how avoiding them does more for your writing than just keep it simple.